Hi Friends,
This past Sunday I offered the sermon/reflection at the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor. I spoke about something I’ve been wrestling with for years now: how to stay rooted in my heart when I’m confronted with words and actions that feel ignorant or cruel—and how to do that without abandoning my integrity.
If you’re struggling similarly, I hope this talk is helpful in some way. Please let me know how it landed and/or how you’re staying heart-centered these days.
If you’d rather read than watch the video above, the original manuscript is below.
Good morning, everyone.
Thank you, Manish, for inviting me into your congregation.
I’m really happy to be here with you all on Valentine’s Day weekend—a time when love is often framed in solely romantic terms. Chocolates. Roses. A nice meal, hopefully. All good things, to be sure.
But today, I want to talk about love in a much broader, more consequential sense. The kind of love that matters not just in our relationships, but in moments like this one—when the world feels fractured, frightening, and at times deeply cruel.
Many of us are carrying a lot right now. Grief. Anger. Fear. Exhaustion. A sense of disbelief about what is happening in our country, and about what forms of cruelty are being normalized in plain sight.
I’m not here this morning to offer spiritual platitudes or forced optimism.I’m here to honor and advocate for the power of love.
I experience love as an energy—alive within us and around us at all times. Which means we get to intentionally engage with that energy whenever we choose.
When we engage creative energy, we may feel compelled to sing, or dance, or cook, or write.
When we engage love’s energy, we feel compelled to be kind. Compassionate. To forgive. To empathize. To honor the clarity of our heart over the fears of our mind.
And I want to be clear: choosing love does not mean looking away. It does not mean compromising our convictions or pretending harm isn’t happening.
Love asks something braver of us.
It asks us to stay present—to what’s happening around us and within us—without abandoning our integrity or our humanity.
That’s what I want to explore with you this morning:What does it mean, really, to live from love in a time like this?
One of the most persistent myths about love—especially in spiritual contexts—is that it’s passive. That it’s synonymous with being agreeable, or quiet, or endlessly patient.
Love may show up that way at times, but often, choosing love is the hardest, bravest choice one can make, especially in these divisive times. And it’s certainly not a quiet choice right now.
Love is not separate from activism, or resistance.Love is what gives these things their depth and direction.
Living from love doesn’t mean we stop naming cruelty. It doesn’t mean we stop—if we feel called—organizing, protesting, protecting the vulnerable, drawing firm boundaries.
Living from love means we refuse to let fear, contempt, or dehumanization become the fuel for our actions.
Because when they do—even in the name of justice—we risk recreating the very harm we set out to dismantle.
I know how easy that is to say, and how hard it is to live.
For thirteen years of my life, I was part of a cult—a small spiritual community centered around a guru whom I believed to be enlightened, and whom I believed would help me become enlightened.
I didn’t join because I was naïve or lacking discernment. I joined because I was seeking belonging, meaning, certainty. I wanted to feel safe, and seen. I wanted to feel chosen.
At first, it felt like all of that had been found. There was clarity. Community. So much love and compassion. A shared moral framework.
But slowly—and surely—I began to override my own inner knowing.
Doubt was reframed as weakness. Discomfort meant I needed to try harder. Questions were discouraged. Challenges to the guru were framed as resistance to God’s will.
My guru described himself as a puppet of God. If I objected to him, I was objecting to God.
And I grew to believe that. I was surrounded by people who believed that.
What I lost during those years—even inside what looked like a loving spiritual container—was my capacity to trust myself.
I learned to surrender my own discernment in order to belong.
And that experience has shaped some of how I understand what’s happening in our culture right now—because this dynamic is not unique to cults. It is a deeply human vulnerability.
Any group—spiritual, political, or cultural—that requires us to abandon our inner authority in exchange for belonging is, first and foremost, pretty culty. It is asking us to trade integrity for inclusion.
And that trade is everywhere.
It’s easy to see this dynamic at work in movements we oppose. It’s tempting to locate it entirely in MAGA culture, Christian nationalism, authoritarian leadership—and there is no doubt that groupthink, cognitive dissonance, and moral outsourcing in these groups are causing real harm. We’re seeing and feeling it every day.
But if we’re being honest, we have to acknowledge that progressive spaces struggle with this too.
Nearly all spaces do. Because this is human.
The pressure to conform.The fear of being cast out.The subtle rewards for certainty.The rejection of—even punishment for—nuance.
When belonging feels conditional, integrity becomes fragile.
We posture. We perform righteousness. We shame others to reassure ourselves we’re on the right side. We dehumanize those whose dehumanizing efforts we’re resisting.
And while that may feel momentarily empowering, it comes at a cost.
Because shame—whether directed outward or inward—hardens us. Narrows our vision. Distances us from the very values we claim to be protecting. The very future we say we want to co-create.
I want to be clear: compassion is not approval. It is not forgiveness on demand. And it is not something we demand from those who have been harmed.
Compassion is a practice we engage in so that we don’t become what we’re resisting.
Author Glennon Doyle often shares the story of a Vietnam War protester who stood outside the White House every night with a single candle. When asked if he thought his actions would change the administration, he replied:
“I don’t come here every night so that I change them. I come here every night so that they don’t change me.”
His words really struck me.
I’ve struggled with this administration to stay in my heart. I’ve struggled, within all the divisiveness, to remain compassionate. In the face of so much cruelty, I’ve struggled to stay connected to my integrity, to who I truly am beyond all this noise and insanity.
Because that’s the question underneath all of this:å
How do we resist cruelty without letting cruelty reshape us?
How do we stay in our hearts when we’re outraged?
How do we face dehumanizers without dehumanizing?
How do we tell the truth without abandoning our humanity?
In my experience, one answer to these questions is simple—but not easy:
We prioritize self-love.
That may sound counterintuitive. I’m speaking about showing up with more compassion for others, and now I’m talking about self-love?
But how we relate to ourselves informs how we relate to everyone and everything else.
We cannot remain in integrity with the world if we are constantly betraying and abandoning ourselves.
When we haven’t learned to treat ourselves with kindness and grace—especially when we’re anxious, wrong, overwhelmed, or afraid—we are far more likely to outsource our worth to groups and ideologies.
We become reactive instead of rooted.Performative instead of present.
When I am willing to recognize my inherent worth—worthy simply because I was born, worthy until the day I die—then I am much more likely to recognize the inherent worth and dignity of every other human being.
That principle—the inherent worth and dignity of every person—is not just beautiful theology. It is revolutionary practice.
If I believe I am only worthy when I am right, then I will treat others as only worthy when they are right.
If I relate to myself with shame and harshness, I will relate to others with shame and harshness. This is how it works. We tend to give what we practice.
But when I offer compassion to my flawed humanity, even when I react from fear instead of respond from love, I am more capable of offering compassion to others who do the same.
We cannot say, with certainty, how we would show up right now had we lived the lives of those whose words and actions we find so abhorrent. Had we experienced their conditioning, and traumas, and fears, we may have ended up exactly where they are, saying and doing the things we find so ignorant and cruel. Let this understanding be a pathway to empathy and compassion.
This is no way suggesting agreement or condoning harm.It is refusing to ignore the heart. Refusing to bypass love.
It’s holding that candle in front of the White House so as not to let the cruelty and evils we see change us.
Self-love is what allows us to pause, to return to our hearts, and to respond—not react—from there.It’s what helps us resist shame as a strategy—toward ourselves and others.It’s what anchors our resistance in empathy rather than contempt.
Self-love doesn’t dilute our moral clarity.It stabilizes it. It energizes us to show up for others as we do ourselves.
And Every wisdom tradition on the planet speaks to loving others as ourselves:
Jesus said, Love your neighbor as yourself.
Buddha said, Considering others as oneself, one should neither harm nor cause harm.
Muhammed said, None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.
Nature shows us that survival itself is relational—nothing lives only for itself, and everything that endures does so by giving and receiving in balance. Ecosystems survive not through domination, but through reciprocity—life sustaining life.
This too, in my opinion, comes back to self-love. I actually do believe that we’re loving our neighbors as we love ourselves, which is to say, not very well at all. With shame. With fear. With endless criticism.
We treat ourselves harshly, and so we treat each other harshly.
We bypass kindness, compassion, and forgiveness. We reject love—at our own expense, and at the expense of our society.
I don’t speak about this as theory. I know the cost of rejecting love.
When I was fourteen years old, my parents were shot and killed in a fruit market they owned in Detroit.
For years, when I thought about the man who killed them, I hated him. I wanted him to suffer. To die.
But that hatred was poisoning me.
So I made a conscious effort—not to forgive him—but to understand him. I imagined what kind of despair must exist in someone to reach that point. I imagined his fear and loneliness. That he must have felt so angry and lost, unseen and unloved.
And I recognized those feelings in myself. Even the violence, which I told myself I could never relate to, I actually could relate to, at least in thought. I had imagined terrible deaths for him.
The more I empathized with his humanity, the more the hatred dissolved. He became not just a killer but a human being—in pain—who made a terrible choice. I felt more and more compassion for him. And then one day, almost miraculously, I realized I had forgiven him.
Empathy was the pathway to forgiveness.And that forgiveness became one of the greatest gifts of my life, and one of the most potent indicators of the power of love.
Recently, I watched a video of people standing outside an ICE headquarters in Minneapolis, singing:
“It’s okay to change your mind. Show us your courage, leave this behind. It’s okay to change your mind, then you can join us, join us here anytime.”
That is our potential. That is empathy, and compassion. That is an invitation.
I’ve also watched many videos of people screaming profanities at ICE agents, and I’ve found myself cheering them on.
And if I witnessed someone being dragged from their home, I don’t know how I would respond. I can feel my blood boil just imagining it.
But I do know this:
The world I want to help co-create—the beloved community so many of us long for—cannot be built from contempt. It’s not possible.
It must be built from courage, integrity, and love.
And because I have power over only myself, it is incumbent upon me to rest in integrity, to listen to the guidance of my heart, and to love myself and my fellow human beings as fiercely as I can.
The question isn’t whether we want to create a more compassionate and loving world. Of course we do.The question is this: from what place will we create it?
I’d like to share a poem by Thich Nhat Hahn that speaks to our capacity for empathy and compassion.
Please Call Me by My True Names
Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow --even today I am still arriving.Look deeply: every second I am arrivingto be a bud on a Spring branch,to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,learning to sing in my new nest,to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,to fear and to hope.The rhythm of my heart is the birth and deathof all that is alive.I am the mayfly metamorphosingon the surface of the river.And I am the birdthat swoops down to swallow the mayfly.I am the frog swimming happilyin the clear water of a pond.And I am the grass-snakethat silently feeds itself on the frog.I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.And I am the arms merchant,selling deadly weapons to Uganda.I am the twelve-year-old girl,refugee on a small boat,who throws herself into the oceanafter being raped by a sea pirate.And I am the pirate,my heart not yet capableof seeing and loving.I am a member of the politburo,with plenty of power in my hands.And I am the man who has to payhis “debt of blood” to my peopledying slowly in a forced-labor camp.My joy is like Spring, so warmit makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.My pain is like a river of tears,so vast it fills the four oceans.Please call me by my true names,so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,so I can see that my joy and pain are one.Please call me by my true names,so I can wake up,and so the door of my heartcan be left open,the door of compassion.
I’ll end with a short prayer.
Feel free to close your eyes and place your hands over your heart if that feels good.
May we learn to live from love—not as a concept, but as a daily embodied practice.May we remember our inherent worth and dignity, even when we falter.May we stay anchored in self-respect when fear invites us to abandon ourselves.May we tell the truth without cruelty, and resist harm without perpetuating it.May we hold fast to compassion so that the forces we oppose do not shape who we become.And may the way we love ourselves quietly ripple outward—into our relationships, our activism, our communities—helping us co-create a more just, courageous, and compassionate world.
Amen. Blessed be. Thank you.
I hope this reflection was helpful to you all, and I pray we can continue to remain in our hearts, in love, no matter how else we choose to show up in these times.
Big Big Love,
xoxo…Scott
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